The Government Used to Hide the Truth, But Now We Can Speak: Contemporary Esotericism in Ukraine 1986-2014

After the fall of the Soviet Union, independent Ukraine faced society-wide anomie and an unprecedented resurgence of ideas that had been previously pushed into the underground, including esoteric ideas. This volume explores how Ukrainian practitioners of esotericism navigated the early years of Ukrainian independence and presented themselves in Ukrainian society. It shows that, during the 1986-2014 period, Ukrainian practitioners of esotericism had two different strategies of self-presentation, which largely depended on their social class and were formed by the class-based policies on the management of education and science implemented in the Soviet period. The bigger and more visible group of esotericists came from the working class and modeled their self-presentation off the official narratives of Soviet academia. Another, smaller group of esotericists had already embedded in academia, and inherited the general practice of Soviet intellectuals to stay invisible to society at large. The thesis demonstrates how the habitus of Ukrainian practitioners was primarily defined by large-scale social processes in Soviet Ukrainian society, including inter-class relations and rivalries, as well as by the colonial history between Ukraine and Russia. Kateryna Zorya is a historian of esotericism and magic. She specializes in contemporary urban magical practices and their transmission.